Anyone for History? by Julia Jones
I showed this photo to a group of ten year olds at a primary school in Clacton-on-Sea without telling them what it was. I asked them to imagine they were on their own, aged about twelve, and looking up at it. They had thirty seconds to look and thirty seconds to jot down words. Then they were allowed to call them out: “Dragon – sea lion – exciting – ugly – fierce – hairy – epic – weird – Elvis Presley hair – alien – zombie dragon – halloween decoration – statue – fat – dirty – slimy – red – Chinese dragon” In fact it's a figurehead from a Dutch warship, the Stavoren , built in Edam in 1653. She was built for the Amsterdam Admiralty (each section of the United Provinces supplied and managed their own fleets) and was probably sponsored by the town whose name she bore. Pencil sketches made in 1658 show, indistinctly, that she had a large painting of a town emblazoned across her stern. The Stavoren was a 48-gun ship with a crew of 180 men and the exciting, ugly, fierce...